Archive for January, 2010

My first job in electronics was with an amusement games company. We placed games, pool tables and jukeboxes in bars & restaurants and split the take with the owners. This was a pretty good deal for the bar owner since he needed only to supply electricity (and put up with the occasional brawl) and he got 25% – 40% of the take. As you can imagine, it was mostly a fun job – even if the pay sucked.

I recently found this fascinating article on the history of Pinball and got to thinking – I haven’t seen a pinball machine in years. Do they even exist any more? I’ll bet that some of you have never even seen a pinball machine.

So far the Tea Party’s record is looking pretty good. But what happens next? Many people — er, well, many pundits, anyway — complain that the Tea Party movement is entirely oppositional: For a brief moment, the key buzzword was “nihilistic,” though the connection between Turgenev and Tea Parties seems rather tenuous.

In fact, Tea Partiers seem quite clear on what they’re for: A limited government, one that keeps its nose out of their business and focuses on things like protecting the country in preference to redistributing income.

In fact, according to recent polls, Americans trust the TEA Party far more than democrats or republicans. Are you surprised? I can’t say I am.

But whether the political class likes it or not, this sort of thing is probably here to stay. While 2009 was the year of denigrating and ignoring the tea parties, I suspect that in 2010, they’ll be listened to quite closely. Those who fail to do so, are likely to find themselves out of a job.

Besides, could something like the TEA Party, which has terrified politicians and unhinged the left be at all bad? I think not!

In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.

In Massachusetts, enough voters got the message. And the more speeches this one-note politician inflicts on the nation, the louder they’ll hear it